


sandpaper and solder

by impossibletruths



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Character Study, Gen, Introspection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-03
Updated: 2018-12-03
Packaged: 2019-09-06 10:34:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,916
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16830925
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/impossibletruths/pseuds/impossibletruths
Summary: On the breaking and mending of wire things, like cages and minds and hearts.





	sandpaper and solder

**Author's Note:**

> finally posting my one (1) second campaign fic over here. caleb & beau from relationship week ages ago.

It is an arduous process to twine wire together again. 

Rope is easier. The fraying edges of rope were alive once, and it takes only a little coaxing, only a few firm-quiet words to make rope whole again. It makes rope good for the tying and the untying; once-living things transmute easily, comfortable with change. Things like that, they take to the transformation.

Wire, though, wire is difficult. Twisted gold or copper or tight-spun silver, wire is made in its own image, and speaking it into something new is a far more taxing chore. It has been a long, long time since he had the words to convince anyone of anything. Even wire. Especially wire.

He doesn’t think about it like that most days. There’s too much guilt to him for metaphor. Half-ruined pictures and filament-fragile connections are meant for madness; clarity is not so kind.

So he does what he has learned to do. He hides the metal-sharp edges of his snapped self as best he can and keeps his head down and waits for this newest transformation to end, eyes fixed on the event line of the horizon and the promises he sets before himself like breadcrumbs.

.

“So, like,” says Beau, in the way she says _so like_ , which is all blunt force. Sometimes he thinks to call her sharp too, but her edges are less razor and more roughness. It is a slantwise kinship, a not-quite-but-almost. They are often not-quite-but-almost he thinks privately. Children of the Empire, scholar-warriors who took to the opposite ends of their discipline. What irony that they have stumbled into each other, have found this tightrope balance.

“So, like,” says blunt Beauregard, sitting the wrong way in the chair she has dragged up while he tries to read, “what are you gonna do?”

“What?”

“To get, y’know.” She jerks her chin up, as though that means something. “Him. Even. Justice.” He cannot quite tell if she means to give him options or she cannot settle on one herself. He doe not think she knows herself.

It does not matter; he does not have an answer for her in any case. It is too much to put into words, too big and too fragile. He will break it if he speaks it. He will shatter it into pieces, and he does not know how he will put everything back together again if he does. He turns the page, eyes skimming the words, thoughts a very long way away.

“I’ll be with you,” she says, just as sudden, just as rough-edged, and his mind and eyes and heart stutter, half-fixed wire filament of himself pulled tight for a moment on an unexpected intrusion. “Y’know. Whenever you’re ready to kick some ass. I’ll help.”

“Thank you, Beauregard,” he says carefully, mouth shaping the words as though he were speaking thin-spun glass into being. He must be delicate with this sentiment, this unearned and unwon gratitude. Too much pressure and it will snap.

“’Course,” she says, as though it is simple enough for _’course_ , and she pushes the chair in and leaves, and he does not know what to do with the swirling in his stomach once she goes. His black-ash heart thrums like a hummingbird in the wire cage of his chest, and he does not want to think on meaning or hope.

So he swallows it all down like Nott’s bitter whiskey and returns to his reading.

.

He remembers a concert.

He remembers sitting between them, Astrid on one side and Aedowulf on the other, and Trent behind. There were four of them, eight of them––four soldiers in the box and four musicians on the stage, and the heavy-thick shimmer of power weaving through the music, blanketing the hall like a shroud. Caleb remembers it clear as yesterday, how he was enraptured by the choking marvel of it all, a world away from his quiet-poor home. Remembers how he flushed with praise from Trent’s sickle-curved lips. How he privately thought himself the viola, rich and full and filling the spaces the violins and cello left empty. Neither the loudest nor the quickest, but constant and sure and always-ready; the steadiness beneath the showmanship. 

The idle fancies of a boy, but some nights they linger. There is no music, now––there has not been music in so very long––but he recalls the rasp of the bow over the strings, catgut turned to soaring melodies. He takes a certain pleasure in remembering with Frumpkin settled in his lap; catgut and cat and gut, and it is a stupid thought to have, a stupid pleasure to take. It is the sort of game he played Then, when he was frayed and broken like the snapped string of a viola, dissonant and out of tune.

He is not snapped now, not quite, but he is still out of tune, and some nights he comes close to fraying again. Some nights the poor solder job of his mind hangs by a thread and the old games and older memories cloud him until it is only a wire-thin filament that keeps him tethered, keeps him whole.

Frumpkin helps. Nott helps. The others, they help. It is hard to drift when they are so constant and so _loud_ , brash and rubbing up against him like horsehair on catgut, drawing notes out of him that are not melody or tune but still something, few faint flickering notes of a future perhaps.

Some six months ago such change would have sent him running, but now something roots him in place, sure as any shackles. He does not know how he is to turn back the past when he is all tangled in the present, but there is more confusion to that than dread.

He has always enjoyed a curiosity, and they are a half dozen curiosities wrapped in noise and vibrance, and when you are halfway to whole it is not such a bad thing to be tangled up.

It is hard to fall apart when so much holds you together.

.

“Beauregard,” he says, once, only the once, when he is just a little hazy with ale and the warmth of the inn. “What do you mean when you talk about your childhood?”

Her motions are too wide when she turns around. Too showy, as though she wants to prove she takes up space, she is here. It had bothered him at first; now it is halfway a comfort to know she is there. “You’re asking me about _my_ childhood.”

“Ja,” he answers, firm. He thinks he is, anyhow. It is important, in some way. He cannot quite clear his mind enough to decide which.

“Uh. What do you mean?”

“You said it was not your own.” Maybe that is not quite what she said. It does not matter; if he spared the thought for it he would remember verbatim, but he is warm and a little hazy and it is nice, for once, to be not quite clear, not quite crystalline. His edges feel smoother, better fitting. Closer to whole.

“Oh, that,” she says, one shoulder tipping in something akin to a shrug. “Just that, y’know. My parents wanted someone who wasn’t me.”

“Oh,” he says, and he doesn’t understand that at all, how a parent could have the marvel of a child and not want it. It would be easier, he thinks, if he understood. If he could step away from the burning hope inside him that he might still make them proud, might still live up to their love. “I think we must have grown up very differently.”

“Well, yeah. I mean like. I was rich, for one.”

“I was not,” he says, because he thinks maybe he should, because he is thinking of slantwise kinships and opposites and similarities and the wire that ties it all together, harder to break than rope, less forgiving, and Beau is just staring at him with her eyebrows tilted. Her mouth quirks.

“No, yeah, that. Like. I know. You said.”

Oh, right. “Yes.” He did. “It is still true, though.”

She stares at him for a long time. Too long, he thinks, but time is half strange right now, hazy and too slow and too fast, and it is no time at all before she grins something that is half grimace, and whatever Fjord has been teaching her has not been all that helpful at all. “Y’know, Caleb,” she says, as though she is letting him in on a joke, and he leans in to hear it, “you’re alright.”

“I do not think that is true,” he tells her, but he does not quite mind when she slings an arm over his shoulder and shouts something obscene at Mollymauk across the room.

.

It is a sanding of sorts, rough surface and sharp edges, and perhaps wire does not readily spin itself whole again but smooth-solid ends are easier to piece together than jagged and broken things. He has had his fill of being a jagged and broken thing. He is ready to be whole again, or close enough. He is ready for the solder job to hold steady. To hold strong.

In truth, it is not all sanding, and she is not all roughness. It would be unfair to know her only by her shell; there is an underbelly to her to, like there is to all things. 

(Trent taught them that, that if you push hard enough even the fiercest beast will roll over. But not them, never them. They were never animal nor anything in the shape of it. They were metal and sharp and fierce and weapons wielded by the sure hand of the Empire. 

That is an old lesson, best forgotten. That is an old lesson, and it sticks.)

He sees it in her moments of kindness. He sees it in her righteous fury. He sees it in her stilted attempts to guide him towards justice for those Trent has ruined, beyond himself.

He appreciates it, he does, but he is not so picky as that. It is not about justice or vengeance; it is about putting right his own wrong, whatever it takes. He has always been a ferocious student. He will teach himself, if he has no other options. What he breaks or burns to get there matters less.

But it is easier to mend when he is not cutting himself on his own edges, and that is something worth his gratitude, wretched as it is.

.

“I like them,” says Nott, lying spread eagle on the bed in the not-terrible inn room they have rented (and that is a newness too, a change, a transformation: the not-terrible-ness of everything, of the room and the companionship and the travel and––)

“ _Ja_ ,” he says, nose buried in his book, and he does not need to look to know Nott is looking at him, eyes yellow and warm and familiar in the dimness of the evening. In the morning they will go down for breakfast and they will all be there, loud and tangled, and Beauregard will look at him like she does not hate him, and he will feel something too-big and swirling in his wire-cage chest, and it will be not-terrible, and he will be frayed but whole, tense and tight and strong as wire, as loathe to break as to heal.

In the morning, it will not quite be alright, but it will be close. 

He says, “ _Ja_. I like them too.”


End file.
